
‘We are putting sustainability on the map in Central America’
NethWork started at the beginning of 2012 as a cooperation between various Dutch horticultural suppliers wanting to contribute to innovation and the sustainable development ...

‘Horticultural businesses are becoming software companies.’
Yuri van Geest wrote the bestseller Exponential Organisations together with Salim Ismail and Mike Malone, in which they expose the power of fast-growing organisations ...

‘A robot has to give you a little something extra.’
Sweeper was launched at the beginning of 2015. The goal of this project is to develop a harvesting robot for sweet peppers. The robot ...

‘I’m not such a big fan of spreadsheets.’
‘Internationalisation is crucial to us’, explains Meiny Prins, CEO and co-owner of Priva, and Businesswoman of the Year 2009. ‘Priva is a family-owned and ...

‘Fewer neck and shoulder complaints and always a uniform quality.’
Leo van den Harg, of the potted rose nursery in Vierpolders that bears his name, bought a Rombomatic ten years ago: a combination of ...

‘An integrated robot doesn’t need to be more expensive than a conventional machi...
‘We won’t even begin to consider developing a solution if the pay-back time is longer than three and a half years,’ says Piet Oomen, ...

‘The introduction of robots requires industrial thinking.’
Millions of products are grown in the horticulture industry, of which none resembles the other. Not only that, growers tend to harvest their crops ...

Waiting for the horticulture robot
Robots appear to be the best solution to combat the rising cost of labour. After all, they can work 24 hours a day, without ...

‘We want to be entirely fossil fuel-neutral; and that extends to our electricity...
In part 2 of this interview, tomato grower Ted Duijvestijn speaks about how he aims to operate his business without any need for fossil ...

‘The focus points of our brainstorming sessions are sustainability, sustainabili...
Duijvestijn Tomaten in Pijnacker was elected ‘world’s best tomato grower’ in the Crop & Process Technology category in 2015. Ted Duijvestijn explains the innovative ...

‘De-leafing curbs energy loss’
Evaporation - and therefore energy loss - can be limited by removing excess foliage. This principle is, however, applied to only a few crop ...

Mobilising all efforts on the imbalance market
Now that the rates for the return of electricity have dropped lower than ever before, growers will have to make all possible efforts to ...

‘Urban farming will not solve the problem of world hunger’
Urban farming is currently a hot item, capturing the interest of people all over the world. The roof of a former Philips building in ...

LEDs for energy savings of 50%
LED lighting allows energy consumption to be reduced in the cultivation of tomatoes with assimilation lighting. Even better: energy consumption can be cut in ...

‘No greenhouse should be without diffuse glazing, no matter where in the world’
Diffuse light is a hot item in greenhouse horticulture, not in the least thanks to Leo Marcelis. Professor Marcelis conducted research into the benefits ...